The 16th Gwangju Biennale unveiled 43 artists and groups from different parts of the world. Selected by Artistic Director Ho Tzu Nyen and curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee and Brian Kuan Wood, this cohort brings together diverse generational and geographical voices to explore how new capacities and forms of life emerge through sustained artistic practice.
The title of the 16th edition You Must Change Your Life is the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1908 poem Archaic Torso of Apollo: “You must change your life”—a call at once urgent yet open, forceful yet generous. The Biennale approaches change as a continuous practice through which bodies and perceptions are reorganised. Though change is often most apparent in moments of sudden rupture and crisis, it is also through the gradual accumulation of day-to-day life practices that we expand our capacity to affect—and to be affected.
“We envision this Biennale to be a gathering of struggles and experimentations across different scales and spheres to converse with each other, to question each other and above all, to amplify each other,” said Ho Tzu Nyen.
The Biennale unfolds as a journey across scales—from the molecular to the cosmic, from intimate gestures and familiar bonds to social formations and resonances across worlds. Throughout the exhibition, artists approach change through multiple registers: from the molecular poetics of Nina Canell to the existential weight of late-socialist life choices in the paintings of Wang Jiahao; from Rafik Greiss’s invocation of Sufi transcendence through breath, movement and repetition, to practices that seek new ways of inhabiting body, history and relations with others.
Techniques of transformation and self-transformation can be found in the practices of mystics, athletes and artists. In the 16th edition of the Biennale, artists such as Tehching Hsieh and Amanda Heng show how sustained practice—through repetition, discipline and attention—can render one’s own life as material, reshaping perception and creating new ways of inhabiting time.
Others such as A K Dolven, Matthew Barney, Jeong Geumhyung and Angela Goh approach the body as continuously produced through affirmation and restraint, defamiliarisation and reconfiguration. Mona Benyamin’s works, meanwhile, defamiliarise the family unit itself, estranging and reimagining intimacies in a world of political injustice, instability and absurdity.
Elsewhere, viewers may follow the path of Rim Dong Sik as he develops new ways of being with landscape, eventually encountering Nature Artist Woo Pyongnam (Jongsun). Nearby will be servings of tea cultivated through the practices of traditional ink painter Heo Baekryeon, who founded the Gwangju Agricultural Technical High School in 1947, bringing together art and agriculture, landscape and learning.
For artists like Christian Nyampeta, the body is activated in relation to other bodies, each amplifying the capacities of others across distant collective learning projects and affinities. In the works of Kiri Dalena, bodies cross thresholds from a molecular individual, to a family member, to a collective body protesting in the street. In the visions of Saodat Ismailova and Sohrab Hura, bodies begin to resonate with other worlds altogether.
Moving audiences across different scales and intensities, the exhibition approaches artistic practice itself as producing capacities to sense, to endure, to relate, to imagine and to transform. Artistic practice emerges here as a force of exercise and repetition that tests and constantly reinvents such capacities.
The Biennale approaches Gwangju as a site of exhibition, but also as a city where art, collective action and political change are inseparable, where the courageous and creative transformation of duress is a historical reality. The Biennale will include a presentation of paintings by the members of the May Mothers House, whose collective persistence and creativity the 16th Gwangju Biennale is honored to share with you.
The 16th Gwangju Biennale is curated by Artistic Director Ho Tzu Nyen together with curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee and Brian Kuan Wood.
Participating artists and groups include:
Matthew Barney
Jean Barth
James Benning
Mona Benyamin
Rossella Biscotti
CAMP
Nina Canell
Lygia Clark
Kiri Dalena & Ben Brix
A K Dolven
İnci Eviner
Angela Goh
Goldin+Senneby
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork
Rafik Greiss
Amanda Heng
Heo Baekryeon (Gwangju Agricultural Technical High School)
James T Hong
Tehching Hsieh
Sohrab Hura
Saodat Ismailova
Volcanoes of Jeju (Jeju Stone Park)
Jeong Geumhyung
E Roon Kang
Sunik Kim
Július Koller
Daisuke Kosugi
Kwon Byungjun and Park Chan-kyong
Lu Yang
May Mothers House
Melvin Moti
Nam Hwayeon
Christian Nyampeta
Bhenji Ra
Rim Dong Sik and Nature Artist Woo Pyongnam (Jongsun)
Ryu Hankil
Sasaki Ken
Suzuki Akio
Ullimsanbang (Huh Ryeon, Huh Hyeong, Huh Geon, Huh Lim, Huh Moon and Hur Jin)
Wang Jiahao
Wang Tuo
Maya Watanabe
Press release from Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Image: James Benning. Still from Stemple Pass. 2012. Single-channel video, colour, sound, 122 minutes. Image courtesy the artist and
neugerriemschneider, Berlin
